At Last, Flat Design Reaches The Animal Butt Kingdom

One man had a vision to render animal butts as flat icons. Now he’s living the dream.

With apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot, who will forever be "tired of magazines sayin' flat butts are the thing," flat butts really are the thing! That is, at least when they’re the flat butts of Peter Jostrand.

Capitalizing on graphic design’s recent flat trend, Jostrand is rendering an animal butt a day on his aptly named blog, Flat Butts. While his blog is new, apparently Jostrand has been building up his butt arsenal for a while. Because when I inquired to learn more about the project, and to find out whether there was a true, ongoing passion behind the site, he informed me that he already had "50 butts queued."

So I couldn’t help myself. I took the opportunity to do a Q&A with the man behind the butts.

How did you come up with the idea to draw flat animal butts?
"The idea came during a work meeting. Our design director was talking about design principles. One of the slides must’ve been talking about minimalism or something, because it was mostly empty with a circle in the middle. The rest is history."

Bee butt.

History indeed. What are your feelings about flat design in general?
"I feel like it really lends itself to butts. Here it was able to turn something familiar into something unfamiliar, which is fun."

When making these butts...I mean...you're pulling up pictures of various animal butts, studying them, and working for what I assume is a very long time to render them as a graphic.
"Oh man, such butts."

Follow up question to my last question: Is that weird?
"Yes, it’s weird, and no, it isn’t not weird. Working on them in the office is weird. I’ve gotten good at hitting Command Tab whenever someone walks past and I’ve got a big panther butt or something on my screen. Some things are hard to explain."

Jaguar butt.

Were you any more obsessed with animal butts than the next guy before this project?
"That depends, how into animals are you?"

Did you ever want to draw a certain butt only to realize it didn’t make a good 2-D butt?
"I made a 2 Chainz butt that wasn't working for awhile—but eventually I think I nailed it." [Ed note: we can’t tell if Jostrand is joking, but(t) we certainly hope he isn’t.]

I just hope it was autotuned. Anything else you want to tell me?
"I just really want to make Flat Butt underwear."